The Electron Pencil

Just a few thoughts that’ve been rolling around on the cutting board of my mind.

THE PERIOD.

A whole bunch of young folks are up in arms over people’s usage of the heretofore innocuous period — yes, the period — in texts and emails and other communiques in use in what is turning out to be this godawful 21st century. There. I used a period to end that sentence. As I should. As I’ve been taught since kindergarten. As people have done in most written languages for thousands of years. Yet an entire generation not only doesn’t like it, they don’t want me to like it either.

I’ve been reading about this phenomenon for a while now. This sniffy snit expressed by the planet’s newbies, whose cerebra, to be sure, are not even fully developed yet but they feel they must ban that simple, straightforward, elegant graphic signal that an entire thought has been expressed. Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “Why Are We Still So Afraid of Using the Grumpy Old Period?” The author tells us that once the smartphone arrived creatures under a certain age decided the period is a trigger, a micro-aggression, an act of non-physical violence. Then they discovered that those older than they hadn’t yet recognized the period as a blunt instrument.

Those benighted older folks, the author continues, actually began to knuckle under to a burgeoning embargo against the poor period. Such bans, he says, have “aged their way up into typical workplace communication….” Conceivably, the next email you send in a workplace context can earn you a good dressing down from the deans of discipline in the HR department. All because device-addicted Gen Z/Alphas have misinterpreted the smallest piece of punctuation extant.

I SMELL.

The Loved One and I not long ago started subscribing to streaming services after years of not having Netflix or Prime Video or even broadcast TV.

Now, I’ve known since childhood advertising’s whole purpose is to tell me how fucked up my home, car, clothing, food and drink choices, skin condition, hair…, hell, my entire existence is, but it all can be remedied, simply and magically, by buying whatever crap they’re peddling. You know, it’s hard to wake up in the morning so use Dial soap and it’ll feel as though you’ve gulped a methamphetamine and ecstasy combo with your coffee. Or only “concentrated” All can get ground-in dirt and grease out of your kid’s jeans.

Those simple problem/solution ads seem so quaint now. These days, even after you wash your clothes and take a shower, both your wardrobe and your body still reek. Commercials implying both interrupt every movie or documentary I flip to. A Tide ad shows a couple cooing over their fresh laundry and telling me how their clothes used to still stink after washing with that other brand. Same with a bath soap brand whose name I forget. The guy steps out of the shower, sniffs his pits, and grimaces. All I can think is what in the hell are these people doing in their lives? For pity’s sake, I’ve rolled in dog shit and gotten the odor out of my pants with a good washing. And I’ve bike messengered throughout Chicago’s downtown streets for ten hours straight on a 95-degree humid August day and emerged from my after-work shower smelling like a newborn baby. The people in these commercials? I can’t imagine what kind fo sewage-laden, toxic chemical morass they subject themselves and their wardrobe to.

HAIR-SPLITTING LIBERALS.

Even though I’m reasonably confident the whole Trump house of cards is teetering and likely will collapse in November, I have next to no confidence my side will fill in the gap.

Trump’s simple message from the get-go (besides his insistence that Brown and Black people are scary and poised to take over everything) was, The system’s broken and you’re getting screwed. That’s plain talk. And who can argue the truth of it? My side, sadly, has been incapable of plain talk for nearly a half century now. Simplicity works. Period. (There I go again, assaulting you with my punctuation — even typing it out loud!)

Not only do Democrats, progressives, liberals and such stripes lack the ability to speak plainly, they refuse to embrace any and all whose orthodoxy differs from theirs by the width of an atom. Comedian Neal Brennan has a good take on it. He says when someone comes up to a group of Republicans and says “I’m a Republican,” the group welcomes him. When a person approaches a group of liberals and says, “I’m a liberal,” the group eyes her suspiciously and says, “We’ll see.”

Take, for example, this: Lots of people, including me, have been equating ICE with the Gestapo. It works. It’s accurate. And it’s a gut-punch. Perfect, right? Wrong. A social media meme is going around featuring a woman — angry, finger-pointing, condemning — saying, essentially, how dare you equate ICE with the Gestapo. You should be equating it with the pre-Civil War slave patrols, dammit. Unspoken but implied is the condemnation of anything having to do with Jews (read, Netanyahu’s genocidal Israel) and forgetting that America always has been, still is, and forever will be a racist slave state. And every one of us who fails to remember that is as bad as Bull Connor. Reinhard Heydrich? Who’s he?

Yeah, Trump’s gonna fall but my side’ll be too busy picking nits with each other to put the pieces of America back together.

We are screwed.